The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s

Part Three: #100-61

80. Bob Dylan: "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (Bob Dylan) 1965 Chart info: U.S. (#39), UK (#9) Available on Bringing It All Back Home

This flurry feels like a how-to farmer's almanac for the 1960s counterculture-- a speed-freak call from the streets and the Invisible Man's basement, offering tricks, warnings, puns, paranoia, LSD concoctions, protest, and fire-hose toting cops. It's famous for the cue-card toting video from Don't Look Back (complete with Allan Ginsberg cameo). I'd venture to say Dylan was ultimately the more interesting poet and this spazzed Beat stuffing breeds the blues with Jack Kerouac and Pete Seeger. Even the seemingly tossed-off notions-- writing in Braille or watching parking meters-- bloom into great thought lines. Everyone's trying to blend in one way or another-- the plain clothes cops, the hippies not wearing sandals. --Brandon Stosuy

Knowing no Portuguese, I imagine Costa's singing not to a lover but to an actual baby-- a six-monther, cradled in her lap and listening to a voice that's loving and cool. And while she and the slow bossa nova are entrancing, the fantastic strings are the wildcard: dipping and flittering, they collide mid-air like two matched flocks of tropical birds. If it's sexy, it's laughing during the act, and the baby in the crib nearby doesn't mind. --Chris Dahlen

78. Sly & The Family Stone: "I Want to Take You Higher" (Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart) 1969 Chart info: U.S. (#60), UK (N/A) Available on Stand!

Sly Stone's ode to letting music take hold is not about marching on Washington. And it's not about spitting in The Man's face. But it's definitely about freedom at any cost. The baton-pass of Rose, Freddie, and Sly Stone and the basso profundo of Larry Graham elevate what is in some ways Sly's most lyrically toothless number into a rapturous call-and-response jam that rocked thousands at Woodstock (or so Mom told us), and even more than that at supermarkets near you every day. But Sly knew what he was doing, slotting the amorphous and joyful "Higher" as the B-side to the more righteous "Stand!" It predicted everything about the next few years from Sly: joy and pain, fun and fire, truth and fucking, darkness and drugs. The perfect antithesis in a career marked by duality. --Sean Fennessey

Another of Lou Reed's inner monologues detailing the poetry of negation, this depicts the solitary sacredness of a high, the ritual of shooting up/zoning: "I have made the big decision/ I'm gonna try to nullify my life." I could retitle it "I'll Be Your Shattered Mirror"-- the protagonist feels like a fucked-up everyman, despite the first person. Sonically, it builds like it could arc forever: Drink coffee, press play, feel the noisy viola inject a frenzy. All the sounds are intensely perfect, but Moe Tucker's drums are the manic pulse: If she stops, the high's kaput. --Brandon Stosuy

Where the U.S.'s "Star Trek" sent a sleek vessel into "the final frontier," Britain's "Dr. Who" began with a cranky old alien hurtling around in a phone booth-- and the theme song couldn't be a better fit. While Ron Grainer's swooping melody and throbbing beat have seen slicker arrangements over the decades, this first version is an incredible piece of primitive electronic music. Delia Derbyshire constructed it in 1963 by manipulating sounds from test tone generators and mixing them together almost note by note, yet the cobbled-together, almost mismatched timbres come together in a lumpy, throbbing-- and definitely futuristic-- whole. --Chris Dahlen

Two reasons this is the best of many good S&G songs. First, Paul Simon never wrote a better melody. It bends and turns-- and yes, drifts-- like it's going to lose its way until he tugs it back in for a chorus that every kid in the 1970s memorized before grade school. And then the lyrics, from a guy given to saying too much, are terrifically restrained and open-ended, with only the barest hints of the story fleshed out. It's an impressionistic, painterly approach not far from where Bob Dylan would be a few years later on Blood on the Tracks. --Mark Richardson

Almost everyone with even a passing interest in JB knows the story of how, while stopping off on tour to record a new single, the raggedy, exhausted band inched as if waist-deep in swamp water through a slower, more grinding version of "Papa's" than the one everyone knows. Someone got the bright idea to get nice with the razor blades and the knob marked "speed everything up," and funk got one step closer to becoming its own genre. Like a lot of music on this list, "Papa's" can seem overfamiliar, but Brown's shift from one of the best ballad singers and soulmen of the early 1960s to the Godfather is still one of the most remarkable transformations in pop history, and this is one of its key moments. --Jess Harvell

With the millions of words written on the political and cultural significance of Bob Dylan's career, it's easy to forget that dude could write a pretty damn fierce breakup song, when he wanted to. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" may be the most venomous of Dylan's "so long, honeybabe" tracks, in part due to the laid-back, icy delivery of its original version. When he gets to the cruel punch line of "you just kinda wasted my...precious time," it's shrugged off like a business transaction, a relationship diss track he can hardly be bothered to sing. --Rob Mitchum

Surely, scores of grass-kissing, mass Romantics have tried to hole away with a couple of their jazzbo buds for a couple deep nights in search of the next Astral Weeks. Such is the seduction of the quick muse. Of course, it's going to sound like shit because, however hard your scatman broheim tries to grimace and spasm like he's feeling the force, he's not channeling his past with folky pathos set to stun-- he's not Van Morrison. "Sweet Thing" is that one thing; sprightly bows sloping down streets, flutes searching through the mist, and elated bass leading to a fountain of youth. "It feels right, but I can't say for sure what it means," Lester Bangs said of it. Of course he can't. --Ryan Dombal

A showcase for Hendrix's wholly original guitar techniques, "Manic Depression" is dizzying with its odd time signature and winding, cyclical melody. And while Hendrix will always be the focal point of his songs, the Experience shouldn't be entirely written off. Drummer Mitch Mitchell is a beast here, pounding every drum in the kit, often leaving bassist Noel Redding to keep things grounded. Lyrically, the song is typical Hendrix-- women, drugs, music, and just getting along, man. But that's neither here nor there: When you're watching the World Series, what the announcers are saying is beside the point. --Cory D. Byrom